Monday, December 29, 2014

Depending on your
outlook, dating can be anxiety-provoking or thrilling. For most of us,
it’s both. Our ambivalence stems from two natural and opposing drives—one to
connect with others and one to protect ourselves from getting hurt. Balancing
these desires is at the core of initiating and sustaining romance. What
happens, then, when a person is especially insecure and harbors a greater fear
of rejection? M. Joy McClure, Ph.D.,
an assistant professor at the Gordon F. Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies,
is intrigued by this question.

Dr. McClure is particularly
interested in a form of insecurity known as attachment anxiety. Such anxiety
develops when others have been inconsistently responsive to our needs. Dr.
McClure describes the condition as being chronically torn between needing to
connect with someone and worrying that the person will leave. People who are
anxiously attached “tend to cling and protest separation,” she says.

Until now, most of the research on
attachment anxiety has focused on ongoing relationships. Dr. McClure wanted to
know whether such anxiety would be problematic from the get-go.

To examine this question, she set up
studies involving speed dating and online dating as well as one in which
participants created video profiles for potential partners and another in which
they collaborated with potential mates on a mock assignment.

Dr. McClure is currently working
with four Adelphi undergraduates to code the online dating study. But from the
other three studies she has gleaned that attachment anxiety leads people to
behave in ways that deter potential mates by seeming either too anxious or,
even worse, aloof. “We see this display of anxiety that leads people to not
really like you, which is kind of sad,” Dr. McClure says.

Monday, December 22, 2014

Adelphi professor of EnglishSusan
Ostrov Weisser, Ph.D., has long specialized in high literature
like the Romantic poets or the 19th-century British novel, but her most recent
book starts out with a close reading of The Bachelor. Yes, the reality TV show.

That’s because Dr. Weisser’s book, The Glass Slipper: Women and Love
Stories, (Rutgers University Press, 2013) is about more than
love stories in literature. It’s a broader cultural study of the linkage
between women and romance and about romance as a kind of cultural script—a
glass slipper—into which we fit our feelings.

In her book, Dr. Weisser looks at
how narratives surrounding women and romance emerged, starting with Jane Austen
and moving from there all the way through Victorian magazines to contemporary
films, and even women’s Internet dating profiles.

“It certainly wasn’t always the case
throughout history that romance was assigned to women,” Dr. Weisser says. “In
the Victorian era, love and marriage became linked to women through another
topic, which was also being intensely examined at the time—the nature of gender
and the ‘proper role’ of women.”

Feminism, the sexual revolution and
women’s increased economic independence have, of course, dramatically shifted
our thoughts on the role of women, Dr. Weisser says, “but romance is still a
story that is mainly aimed at women.”

So why has the link endured?

One possible explanation: “Just turn
on the TV,” Dr. Weisser says. “You’ll see even for very young girls the idea of
being on sexual display is hyped like never before. Romantic love is a way of
ensuring that a woman is not going to be devalued or exploited. A man needs you
emotionally, not just sexually. It ‘solves’ the problem.”

While Dr. Weisser is quick to point
out that The Glass Slipper is far from an advice book, that doesn’t mean she
doesn’t have any words of advice to pass along to young people. “I worry about
the unquestioning acceptance of the models of romantic love out there,” she
says. “I think they’re stifling. Who is to say it’s not love if it doesn’t have
a happy ending?”